Punchy Nenshi calls on Danielle Smith to stop playing separatist games

Also: Poilievre running in Battle River—Crowfoot by-election, gets unwelcome greetings from UCP VP

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Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi (source: Dave Cournoyer)

Today marks 10 years since Rachel Notley’s Alberta NDP swept the province and defeated the 43-year old Progressive Conservative government to win the 2015 election. On the eve of this anniversary I spent part of the weekend at the party’s annual convention at the Edmonton Convention Centre.

Around 1,000 NDP supporters packed the halls of the downtown convention centre to take political training sessions and listen to guest speakers like Harvard University’s Marshall Ganz and Saskatchewan NDP leader Carla Beck. Delegates also debated policy proposals and constitutional amendments, including a controversial change allowing Alberta NDP members to opt-out of automatically becoming members of the federal NDP (it passed after a long debate).

This change reflects the sometimes uneasy relationship between the two parties and the reality of electoral politics in Alberta. In media scrum outside the convention hall, current leader Naheed Nenshi described the Alberta NDP’s voter coalition as including a lot of Nenshi-Carney and Nenshi-Poilievre voters. Like most things in Alberta politics, voter coalitions are rarely clear cut and uncomplicated.

Nenshi delivered an hour-long keynote speech at the convention on Saturday during which the former Calgary mayor reminded delegates of his role leading Alberta’s largest city through the 2013 floods and the important role that frontline public workers played in getting the city through that disaster.

Nenshi’s speech was upbeat and touched on a lot of traditional NDP points about public health care, public education and rights for workers, but he was most animated when ripping into Premier Danielle Smith’s threat that the Liberal Party’s re-election would spark an unprecedented national unity crisis and her flirtation with Alberta separatists.

‘I will be damned if we ever let Danielle Smith tear the country down,’ Nenshi said. “Alberta’s New Democrats will always, always, always stand with the millions and millions of Canadians who believe in a stronger, more unified country,” Nenshi said.

“No more playing stupid separatist games with the future of our province! No more disrespecting Indigenous communities! No more disrespecting Albertans!”

“So to premier Smith, I’m talking to you directly now, stop playing games,” he said. “You have two choices: denounce separatism once and for all, and do it today, or let Albertans decide.”

The moment Nenshi dared Smith to call a referendum on Alberta’s separation from Canada might be the one part of his speech that would have received a rousing applause at another event a few blocks away. As Nenshi was delivering his speech at the convention centre, a crowd of a few hundred people gathered outside the Alberta Legislature for a “Rally for Alberta Independence.”

Alberta’s cottage industry of small right-wing groups and political parties has been busy churning out threats of separation from Canada and paying tributes to American President Donald Trump since it became obvious that Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives would fail to defeat Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals in the April 28 federal election.

Smith’s move the day after the federal election to lower the number of signatures needed to trigger a province-wide referendum was warmly welcomed by United Conservative Party-adjacent groups like the Alberta Prosperity Project. That group is collecting signatures to hold a province-wide referendum on separation that could possibly take place during Alberta’s October municipal elections.

Separatists are nothing new to politics in our province but their support largely exists on the fringes of Alberta politics.

At the moment, there are at least six minor political parties in Alberta advocating some form of independence from Canada but none of them have experienced any widespread support. The Alberta Advantage Party, Buffalo Party, Solidarity Movement of Alberta, Independence Party of Alberta, Wildrose Independence Party and Wildrose Loyalty Coalition earned a combined 15,556 votes out of the total 1,777,321 votes cast by Albertans in the 2023 provincial election.

The separatist Maverick Party, created by the Wexit group after the federal Liberals were re-elected in 2019, was absent from the ballot in last week’s federal election because the party was deregistered earlier this year after failing to file its financial documents with Elections Canada.

A lot of Albertans carry some level of grievance or unhappiness with the national government in Ottawa but western alienation should not be confused with support for separation from Canada. Being frustrated with Ottawa is not the same as wanting to leave Canada. Most Albertans understand that separating from Canada would do little to fix the problems they have with Ottawa, in fact it would probably make the situation worse.

Smith embraced an Alberta sovereignty agenda when she launched her campaign for the UCP leadership in 2022 and the influence of her Chief of Staff Rob Anderson’s Free Alberta Strategy is well-known.

Nenshi’s decision to call out Smith on her government’s spring fling with Alberta separatists and dare her to hold a referendum is a politically risky move. Anyone calling for a referendum on a dare should be careful what they wish for.

Smith remains popular among her supporters, as shown by the large crowd who showed up at the party’s fundraising dinner in Red Deer over the weekend. But there are cracks in the UCP’s political armour. Kicking former cabinet minister Peter Guthrie out of the UCP Caucus appears to have only freed his hands to reveal more about the alleged government corruption and political interference in private surgical company contracts — a story that won’t go away despite Smith’s efforts.

Nenshi’s move is a political tactic that could plant seeds of doubt into Smith’s motives when she creates a new version of the Fair Deal panel, as she is expected to announce in a video on her social media channels today. It could also put Smith’s UCP candidates in an uncomfortable position in upcoming by-elections in Edmonton-Strathcona and Edmonton-Ellerslie (Nenshi is running in Strathcona).

Nenshi earned the support of 89.5 percent of convention delegates in the NDP’s annual leadership review but he has been criticized by some party stalwarts for being too low-key since his landslide win in the NDP leadership contest last summer. Putting Smith’s toying with separatist sentiments at the top of the NDP’s agenda could mark the return of the punchy Nenshi that NDP supporters flocked en masse to support last June.

A punchier Nenshi might be what the NDP believes their party needs to make sure Notley’s big win ten years ago wasn’t just a once in a lifetime event.

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Poilievre running in Battle River—Crowfoot by-election, gets unwelcome greetings from UCP VP

Conservative MP Damien Kurek is resigning to allow party leader Pierre Poilievre to run in a by-election in the huge rural riding of Battle River—Crowfoot.